Throughout his works, Robert Jenson held to a maxim that doubled as a method. Simply, the proof of theology is in its preaching— or preachability perhaps. Theology proves itself in the pulpit in that theology is for proclamation. With a friend, I recently listened to cassette recordings of Jenson’s old sermons and was delighted and surprised to discover how the load-bearing claims in his mature theological work show up in the preached word.
In the case of this sermon, Jenson resorts to the refrain from Jeremiah, “On that day.”Then, flatly, as if no answer had been given, Jenson asks, “What day is it?” Three times he asks Jeremiah’s question. And thrice he ventures an answer: Jerusalem under Babylon, Jerusalem under Rome, and Jerusalem now. God is whoever raised this Jesus, having first been the God who spoke through Jeremiah, Jenson might say. Finally, Jenson points to Jeremiah’s prophecy being “concentrated in one Israelite.” This is Jenson’s Christology of Israel, the refusal of every supersessionist account, delivered in four words a congregation can hold without a footnote. The mission was Israel’s. It does not become the church’s by transfer. It becomes the church’s by inclusion in the one Israelite who already carried it, was killed for carrying it, and was raised still carrying it.
From there Jenson posits a harder claim because it offers no comfort that can be banked, “started but not completed.” Easter is not behind the church functioning as warrant for whatever the church does next. Easter is ahead of the church, with the church positioned inside it, unfinished, mid-day, the second half of the day not yet arrived. This is Jenson’s refusal of every eschatology that lets the present read as denouement. He will not let centuries since the resurrection count as improvement on it. “Each century is bloodier than the one before it” is not pessimism. It is his theological claim about a kingdom that arrives apocalyptically or not at all, refusing every account of gradual moral ascent. He preaches it here without a single technical term.
Also evident here is Jens’ ecclesiology, which he never separates from the eschatology. The church, he preaches, is anticipation not institution. However imperfectly, the church is the only place where the unfinished resurrection becomes visible at all. Just so, he closes with the image of childbirth. The End comes through labor not by mere arrival.
Above all, in this and his other sermons— as in his theological work, Jenson risks candor when it comes to the grisly nature of history and the unreliable record of Christ’s bride, and he leaves us with the challenge to trust the promises of God in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.
Here is the transcript of the sermon:
April 29, 1996 — Jeremiah 30.8-9, St. Olaf College Chapel Service
“On that day. Jeremiah spoke this prophecy very early in the sixth century before Christ, in Jerusalem, which after centuries of political decline and military defeat was then no more than the capital of a small vassal state within the Babylonian Empire.
Jeremiah was among those who thought Judah, or Israel, or Jacob — he uses the terms interchangeably — could only hope for survival by accepting the situation.
The prophecy is about that day. On that day, Jeremiah foretells, there will be in Jerusalem sheer terror and destruction. Yet from it will come rescue, and more than rescue: freedom and peace, and the worship of God.
So what day is that? It was a day in the summer, probably of 586 BC, when Jeremiah’s politics were confirmed. The Babylonian Empire finally lost patience with the rebellions of its Judean vassal state and abolished it. They besieged Jerusalem, took it, razed its public buildings and fortifications, razed the temple, the center of its life, and prevented further rebellions by carting off the elites into exile — the clergy and nobility and officers and landowners. So that was that day.
But in Jeremiah’s hope, that day was also to be the time when this pain and terror would, after a pause, issue in restoration — and not just in restoration, but in the fulfillment of Israel’s national vision: a finally achieved loving and just community under a true descendant of David, and in pure faith and love for God. Indeed, in his understanding and that of other prophets, it was Israel’s mission to make peace and establish righteousness universally. On that day the nations would beat their swords into plowshares.
And indeed, after a few decades there was a sort of restoration. A new set of empire builders, this time the Persians, conquered Babylon, and did let the Jewish elites dribble home back to Jerusalem, and let a new temple and city be built. But a triumphant return to establish a reign of universal peace and justice in the world it did not turn out to be. It did not even establish an emancipated Judaic state. The nation remained weak, and wars and empires and oppressions went on, and still do.
So the Jews, and Gentile Christian believers now with them, still wait for the Jerusalem of Jeremiah’s hope. We wait still for the Lord to restore the fortunes of Israel and Jacob.
On that day. So what day is it?
It was a day in Jerusalem again, centuries later — the triple day of Holy Thursday and Good Friday and Easter that we are still celebrating. That was Good Friday, when God and this rebellious world finally lost patience with each other. We, seizing our chance, organized a lynch mob in Jerusalem, of course, to get rid of God’s intrusions into our lives once and for all. For that was Israel’s mission — to intrude into our world God’s will to peace and justice. And it has been a mission neither Israel nor the rest of us have tolerated well. This mission was then concentrated in one Israelite, in this one member of Jacob.
That day was the day of Good Friday, when God, as the final exquisite act of his wrath, let us do it. That day was indeed so great there was none like it: a great time of distress for Jacob, when all the parties who represented Israel’s mission got together to kill David our king, whom the Lord had raised up for us.
And it was the day of Easter. On that day, not yet all of Israel was rescued from the terror of the world. But the one Israelite, Jesus — God’s own sending to us, that we had thought we’d be finally rid of — was raised up in a fashion beyond Jeremiah’s fondest hopes. A descendant of David lives with the panic and the terror and the violence and the death and the oppression behind him and beneath him, with what Jeremiah called the yoke and bonds of oppression — that is, in his case, the cross on which he, like so many thousands and millions, had been nailed by imperial power. That cross turned into a symbol of love and peace. As the creed says, he is even now at the right hand of the Father, ruling with God’s own power over all things.
We indeed are not yet raised, and must still face panic and violence and war and death and all those things from Jeremiah’s poem. But he is. And there is, moreover, a community in which we can even now, as Jeremiah said, serve this David our King, and the God he brings us, and in which we can even now practice peace and love. We call it the church. The one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is sometimes hard to find in this time of Western Christianity’s disintegration, and even when found has many flaws, for we its members are not yet ourselves risen from the dead. But we are in the church permitted to serve the risen David King. And therefore in the church it does happen that folks who otherwise have nothing to do with each other, who may even fear and dislike each other, eat and drink together, and speak to God together, and learn bit by bit to love each other.
But of course, though Jesus is raised, we are not, and though he is in fact in charge of this world now, you could not easily know it: the violence and the oppression and the hatred go on, and indeed increase. So we have to ask one more and last time: that day — well, what day is it?
And we have to say that day is today. The resurrection is started but not completed. In the church we may serve the Lord, but the world serves ever more brutal and perverse gods. There is, for all the church’s shortcomings, peace among the followers of King Jesus. But in the world each century is bloodier than the one before it — unless Jeremiah’s prophecy is simply false.
We seem to live right in the middle of that day. Inside the one day of terror and restoration. Inside the one day of death and resurrection. Inside the one day of destruction and glorious fulfillment. Unless you bury yourselves completely in such little private satisfactions as you can scrape together, you will live your lives amid continuing panic and terror and no peace — until that day is fulfilled, and the Lord finally breaks the world’s yoke, and, still using Jeremiah’s language, breaks its bonds, and the Son of David, King Jesus, rules openly, until what can now be experienced only fitfully in the church bursts into universal glory.
Jeremiah did not choose his metaphor of painful childbirth — of men running around acting like they were women in labor — at random. The birth of God’s Son, Jesus, the Son of David, and of his sisters and brothers, you and me, is apparently a difficult delivery. We and our world are even now racked with it. But the days are surely coming, says Jeremiah, says the Lord, when an unimaginable love — we will serve the Lord and Jesus our King, whom the Lord has already raised up for us.”
